Thoreau Center Brown Bag: Greening the Main Post

Join us for a lively discussion about the many improvements planned for the Main Post, in the Presidio. Learn more about plans to improve parking while creating a more pedestrian-friendly park. Over the next few years, the Presidio Trust hopes to reopen the Presidio Theatre, provide more public programs and build a lodge for overnight guests and daily visitors to the park.

Wednesday, November 17, 12:30PM to 1:30PM

Pacific Room at Tides, Thoreau Center for Sustainability

Presenters: Tia Lombardi, Director of Public Affairs; Michael Boland, Chief of Planning, Projects and Programs; John Fa, Main Post Coordinator

Brown Bag events are free informal mid-day learning sessions hosted at Tides. Friends, neighbors and colleagues are welcome. Visitors, please sign in at the front desk.

Presidio "Green" Grand Opening

Open House Celebrating the Public Health Service District -
San Francisco's First "Green" Neighborhood

Saturday, September 25
11 am to 4 pm

The Public Health Service District - site of the park's largest historic building - has been revitalized as a "green neighborhood where people live, work, and enjoy the outdoors. Be among the first to explore and enjoy this historic area long close to the public. Learn more about the Public Health Service District.

The Thoreau Center and the Whole Earth Library will be attending.

Open House Activities

• Tour the historic former hospital, nurses' quarters, and surgeons' houses, and learn how they have been sustainably transformed into contemporary homes and workplaces.
• San Francisco street food vendors and live music
• EcoVillage showcasing sustainable ideas and non-profit organizations
• Lobos Creek Scenic Overlook
• Fun for kids provided by the Presidio Community YMCA
• Open House at Arion Press
  

For more information and directions visit: http://www.presidio.gov/calendar/ggopresidio.htm

Charity Vargas Presentation

Thursday, December 11
12:30 to 1:30p
Pacific Room at Tides

Whole Earth Library at Thoreau is pleased to kick off its first literary event with a presentation by Photographer Charity Vargas. Charity will present images from her new photography book The Presidio: Portraits of a Changing Landscape and discuss the evolving nature of the park throughout it's 200 plus year history. You can also take a look at the book online at its companion website: PresidoBook.com.

An excerpt from the introduction by Presidio Historian, Randolph Delehanty, Ph.D.

“Ms.Vargas came to live in the Presidio three years ago during this momentary pause in its long life. She started exploring the complex old post looking carefully and lovingly at its gentle sleep and slow but steady revival as a national park with a new civilian community living and working here. She has an eye for what it essential about the Presidio: the very American ordinariness of its military architecture and the strange “wildness” of its man-made forests. Many of her images put the two together in a new way, as a filigree of evocative shadows cast on the “screens” of plain white walls. They almost seem like photographs of photographs with the building walls the film on which the fugitive shadows are cast. Photography - literally writing with light - here becomes writing with shadows with the unseen light source behind us.”